Farmed & dangerous: there's something sadly fishy about "bathtub" salmon

Fish have long been revered as a healthy alternative to red meat and a great source of those ever-crucial omega-3 essential fatty acids. But few people know that most fish today are mass-produced. Have you had salmon lately? Whether bought in a store or ordered in a restaurant, odds are great that--far from what you've been led to believe by advertisers--your meal was born in a plastic mold. It was raised on a fish farm, caged in cramped quarters and unable to swim freely. It was forced to fatten up on food pellets like a marine couch potato. That may not concern you as long as the resulting fillet packs a full range of health benefits.

But the fact is, it doesn't.

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down on the farm

Let's take a closer look at what's for dinner and why it's not as good for you as you'd think. First, at some point, your fillet was vaccinated against disease. Later, it was flushed with antibiotics. After all, bacteria and parasites--which would normally exist in relatively low levels in fish scattered around the oceans--can run rampant in the densely packed acres of net-covered fish farms.

"The rapid increase in resistance to these antibiotics represents major challenges for this source of food production worldwide," stated a 1994 report by the American Society of Microbiology's Task Force on Antibiotic Resistance.

Your salmon was also likely fed carcinogenic and mutagenic pesticides to help it shed its inevitable beard of sea lice--the consequence of remaining inactive in a tiny cage. But wait, it's a healthy pink color, isn't it?

Well, sure it is--you chose it. That's color number 33 on drug giant Roche's color list. Extensive market tests were conducted to determine the precise shade of salmon color that appealed most to target consumers.

"Deeply colored flesh was associated with higher quality, better tasting salmon," according to sales literature for Sysco, the giant food service supplier. So to get that perfect pink hue, your fish was fed astaxanthin, a synthetic pigment. Without it, the salmon--confined throughout its life to an area the size of a bathtub--would have pale and unappetizing flesh, to say the least.

wholely mackerel

But what about those heart-healthy omega-3s? You can't pick up a magazine without reading about the restorative properties of omega-3 oil and, especially, of two fatty acids found in fish: eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Just last year, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported on two new long-term studies, concluding that eating omega-3-rich fish at least once a week can significantly cut the chance of your keeling over from a clogged ticker.

Indeed, years before that, fish was touted as the food that keeps the Japanese trim and their hearts hardy--a food potentially pivotal in preventing not only heart disease, but cancer, depression, Alzheimer's disease and other chronic illnesses. Especially important as sources of omega-3 fatty acids are cold-water ocean fish such as salmon, mackerel, sardines and herring. Fish such as sole, halibut and cod, on the other hand, have relatively low omega-3 concentrations.

artificial fish?

So even if your farmed fish is packed with antibiotics and artificial colors, it still provides essential omega-3s, right? Guess again. "Farmed fish usually don't contain much omega-3 at all," says Frank Hu, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the April 2002 lAMA study. "Only fish from the open oceans contain many omega-3 essential fatty acids."

The reason? Diet. "Wild fish and algae are stored as omega-3," says Hu. "Fish in farms eat mostly corn or soybeans and will store omega-6 in the body."

Fish farmers originally tried to stick to the natural diet, but salmon can eat 10 times their body weight, which necessitates grinding up 10 pounds of sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring and other fish for every pound of fish produced. Not exactly a profitable equation. So feed manufacturers started adding vegetable proteins, such as soy, canola and corn gluten, as well as animal by-products and vitamin and mineral supplements to their pellets. Today's commercial fish feed consists of only 35 percent fish--a proportion that is falling fast--and with it, your meal's ultimate omega-3 content.

And it's these omega-3s that we need. The typical Western diet already contains a disproportionate amount of omega-6 oil, found largely in vegetable oils and processed foods. This imbalance can actually cause inflammation and lower your body's defenses against some diseases. Studies show that women with breast cancer have two to five times more omega-6 fatty acids than omega-3s in their systems. So omega-6-rich farmed fish may not be doing you much good at all.

fish or foul

"We've made some mistakes in the past, and we acknowledge them," says Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association. British Columbia is the source of almost half of the farmed fish eaten in the United States. The rest originates in Chilean waters.